Re: [Fwd: RH Linux 7.1 on DPW 433au]/follow-up

["\"Thursday\" AKA dr. john" <thursday allidaho com>]

Dear Robert,

I've seen your earlier postings on the subject.  I am thinking about
taking the kernel and Xfree86 upgrade cure, but haven't done it yet.

I eMailed 3dLabs tech support, the kid that emailed me said they don't
write their own Linux drivers and i shd contact Xfree. Dig!  I had asked
for the brand & mosdel of clock chip.  Clock chip?  What's that?

Sometimes my 500a boots up and gets a good grip on the video and
everything is fine.  Someimes it goes into a 2-second flash mode, and
kicks the screensaver in.  Today was a new one on me, I switched from
Netscape mail to Netscape Navigator and everything went pow!  I had to
go into console mode and shutdown -h now.

My thought is that the card's internal clock is out of phase with
something in RedHat Linux and it depends on when the Xserver kicks in
relative to the card's clock during the boot cycle.  About 50% of the
time the card works, so I would guess that when the CPU/OS clock and the
card clock are in the same halves of their cycles, they can lock in. 
But the connection is easy to disrupt, like making a sudden mouse click
at exactly the right time ...

For what it's worth, Digital Unix has no problem at all running this
card, same machine.  DEC doesn't have an xfconfig file, I followed some
instructions from Graham Allan and hacked into what it's got
(/etc/dt/config/Xservers) and it's just one line plus some  ... stuff, I
don't know what the rest of it does.  I was able to put in a line of
code and set the screen resolution and color bits, not a word about
modes, monitors, keyboards, mice, cards, nothing.

It's really different from Linux, but it works great.

This is and ISSUE, as they say.  If I were 3Dlabs, i would put some
money and effort into protecting my monopoly on the Alpha market .. the
ONLY decent card that supports Linux, VMS and Digital Unix for under
about $600  .. and i would write some NT drivers while I was at it.

Ask Bill Gates ... when you got a monopoly, you wanna keep it.

later

jn